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BizTalk CRM Lookup functoid is now ready for CRM Online

In recent years I often integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM by using BizTalk Server, and as many know, BizTalk Server does not have a native connector for MS CRM.

For this reason, we must work hard to generate canonical schemas, to resolve lookup type fields, Guid type fields and generally to develop maps.

To increase the productivity of my team I have always tried to develop tools or helpers to automate the development of long and repetitive tasks, reducing the possibility of generating errors and standardize approaches to problems.

In recent months, with the cooperation of Nino Crudele and Sandro Pereira we published several functoids that simplify integration with Dynamics CRM and in this article I want to describe the work that has been done to also integrate the CRM Online.

When you integrate MS CRM using BizTalk Server, typically you have at least two problems:

Today we released a new version where you can find the CRM Lookup functoid with two new features:

The ability to define more than one configuration in the SSO. This allows of integrating more than one CRM instance with a single BizTalk Farm

Now you can integrate CRM On-Line. CRM Lookup, for performance reasons, performs lookups operation by accessing the CRM database in read only. However, the CRM Online does not expose his database, so we added the ability to do lookups using the native CRM web services that are present in both the online and on-premises versions.

The functoid now takes five mandatory input parameters:

SSO Application Name: the connection parameters are stored inside SSO. Here you have to specify the application name where you decide to store the settings. This allow you to have multiple CRM environments that you can integrate;

CRM Guid Field Name: key field name of which you want to get the value;

CRM Entity Name: CRM entity name on which the resolution will be performed

CRM Input Field Name: imagining having a “code” as input and you want to know the CRM physical key, in this attribute should specify the name of the “code” field.

CRM Input Value: value from source system to resolve

The output of the functoid is a string, Example: 6erg5r-sdrf56-4dfgt5-6ty5r4-456trt 24

Hi Salvatore, Thanks for creating this functoID, I have been trying to make it work but it’s not working, it’s not throwing any error but in the output I get empty string, I am using it to connect to CRM online (as mentioned in your post), I tried to put an invalid URL of the Organization service in SSO but even then it didn’t through any error, can you please help me with this?